It's definitely better to be a good league team than a good cup team. It shows consistency. The cup could be down to a lucky draw and might not show the value of your team like the league does.

I would be very surprised if Phil Neville didn't go into management and possibly Johnny Heitinga, too.

I turned down Premier League jobs; I didn't think they were right.

Messi gets kicked by everybody, and he gets up and carries on. Doesn't scream, doesn't fake injury.

You don't always get what you want, but you work at it.

Managers get interviewed for jobs, but I think it should be the managers who are interviewing the chairman.

It was too short: I've said many times that I would have done things differently had I known I'd only have 10 months because United are one of the few clubs in football who could have given a manager more time, like Bill Kenwright did with me at Everton.

Maybe it's old-fashioned, but I've always preferred to see players with my own eyes than on a video or going on somebody else's recommendation. If that means getting up early and taking a flight, then so be it. Our success at Everton came from having a great recruitment team who I made sure were out watching the players.

Coaches are important, but the senior players at a club are crucial.

Doesn't everyone in life deserve a chance to show what they can do?

I have always been an advocate of players and coaches going abroad if that's the right opportunity.

One of the reasons why I wanted to be part of the League Managers Association was because I felt there were an awful lot of foreign coaches coming into these shores, but we were not exporting enough British talent.

Phil Neville could be on the road to one day, maybe, becoming the England manager. I know him closely. He was a great captain, a great leader. He's had great experience.

It took time at Everton to build a team so that when we did go to United or Arsenal or Liverpool, we went with a good chance of getting a result.

I'm a great believer in the lower leagues, the pyramid system, but there is mileage in having B-teams in England with young players playing competitively.

When I took over at Everton, the challenge for us was to try to go toe-to-toe with a club having success in Europe and sometimes competing for the Premier League.

Football has always been in my blood. It's more than just an occupation, but as you get a little bit older and wiser, you want to be able to pick and choose and make sure you get the right club at the right time.

Danny Welbeck was great for us at Manchester United.

I have no regrets about taking the United job. When you get offered a job like that, you take it.

Mistakes can come at any time; the thing is to make sure you don't make too many.

At the top end I do think it's time we have goal-line technology, I'm not mad on other technology but certainly goal-line technology.

Supporters don't like the idea of people going to ground too easily. Everyone who has ever played football, everyone who's been involved, would hate that. You'd be saying, 'Get Up!'

The Merseyside derby is a terrific game full of passion, full of quality.

Clubs are much stronger than any one individual.

Manchester United was a club with great traditions, traditions where they tended to pick British managers. That tradition has now gone.

Chicharito is a really good player, and his finishing ability is as good as there is anywhere.

I think, in football, you have to go through difficulties.

Black history is a series of missing chapters from British history. I'm trying to put those bits back in.

The refusal to accept that the black presence in Britain has a long and deep history is not just a symptom of racism, it is a form of racism. It is part of a rearguard and increasingly unsustainable defence of a fantasy monochrome version of British history.

Very occasionally, I wish I was French. The fantasy usually materialises just after a holiday, when I dream of living by the warmth of the Mediterranean, or after a trip to Paris during which I indulge fantasies of being a Left Bank cafe-bohemian.

The history of the British empire, the chapter of our national story that would have explained to my classmates why a child born in Nigeria was sat among them, was similarly missing from the curriculum.

Our national history cannot be national if, in the near future, one in three young adults feels their stories remain untold, if this country's long global history of empire and interconnections is marginalised and if the historical reality of race is rendered almost invisible.

When historians write the last pages of their books, and the producers of history documentaries sit down to edit the final minutes of their programmes, there is often a strong urge to look to the future and emphasise the positive.

What needs to be debated is whether IQ tests, as currently designed, are fit for purpose, and capable of measuring the changing nature of intelligence in the 21st century among generations brought up with digital technology and different learning habits.

My view as a historian is that the empire was an extractive, exploitative, racist and violent institution and that the history of empire is one we need to confront and come to terms with, rather than celebrate.

Whether we like it or not, there are moments in history when pessimism is the appropriate response.

History suggests that the disillusioned and the disaffected do not readily take to the streets nor man the barricades to defend a system that failed to defend them.

It is true that Britain and its institutions have survived past crises, but often this was because those in charge, at a certain point, snapped out of the stupor of latent optimism, recognised the dangers circling the nation and acted.

I have always been most drawn to those moments from the past when people from distant lands and different societies made contact with one another.

The nation of 2019, exponentially wealthier, appears to have a fraction of its former self-belief and little faith in its capacity to solve the latest in a long line of housing crises that stretch back to the 18th century.

In my school, racism was ubiquitous and unrelenting, and not just from the pupils. For a year I was terrorised by one of my teachers.

History, after all, is a process, not a position, and it is not best written in bronze and marble. It is complex, plastic and ever-changing; all things that heroic statues are not.

Democratically elected governments meekly requesting giant corporations to pay pitifully low levels of tax on their enormous profits is not a good look.

Excusing or downplaying British racism with comparisons to the US is a bad habit with a long history.

The easiest way to make television authentic is to make it really authentic.

The OBE, CBE and MBE are among the ways Britain honours its citizens for their contribution to national life. I wish we had agreed on a different form of words, but we haven't and the decision to change the system is above my pay grade.

I went to school in the 70s and the 80s, and the last thing I expected of my schools back then was that they would be the places in which I would be taught about black history.

Britain went to war in 1939 in the name of freedom and democracy, but fielded armies within whose ranks were black and brown men who were regarded and often treated as second-class citizens.

Historians spend their days engaged in the literally endless task of reshaping and expanding our view of the past, while statues are fixed and inflexible.

As well as remembering the service of the non-white soldiers and auxiliaries of the first world war, we have also to remember what happened to them and their dreams of justice in the months and years after the armistice.